SANTA MONICA (CBS)  Santa Monica smokers may be breaking the law if they light up in the privacy of their own homes, after the City Council approved a more restrictive anti-smoking law Tuesday night.

The ordinance would prohibit smoking for new tenants in multi-unit housing and force existing residents to declare their apartments and condos as smoking or non-smoking units, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press. If smokers neglect to designate their units, they lose the right to light up at home.

The City Council also asked for a drop dead date after which every unit in Santa Monica would be declared non-smoking.

Information about whether a unit is smoking or non-smoking would also be given to every resident in the building, concerning at least two city council members that the designation would create second class citizens, according to the Daily Press

I actually listened to the council meeting on the radio while they discussed this.

The two council members against the ordinance were just afraid that long term smoking tenants in rent controlled apartments would be harassed by their landlords so as to free up the unit so that new tenants paying higher rents could move in.

So exactly none of the council members was concerned about the freedom of people to do what they want in the privacy of their own homes.

They equated smoking with keeping a house so untidy that it drew rats, or playing music so loud in your house that it could be heard outside.

Smokers are rebellious. Must crush rebellion. /s Mexifornia will be the first 100% government-operated State. First, all private sector businesses and most cities must declare bankruptcy due to stifling over-regulation. That’s well on it’s way.

That topic actually came up, at least with regard to medical marijuana.

If you don't let people smoke in their homes, then they won't be able to smoke their California-legal medical marijuana. One council member thought that the rule only applied to tobacco smoke, but the lawyers disabused him of this notion.

For some reason that argument was brushed aside without being responded to directly.

It looks like even in Santa Monica the helicopter soccer moms have more political weight than aging hippies.

Evidently the city had just recently voted to lower parking fees. She claimed that this would tend to encourage more people to drive into the city resulting in more air pollution and more suffering by asthmatics. So she asked why are you lowering parking fees at the same time you are making it a crime to smoke in your own home?

The Kennedy on the board rambled on and eventually lamented that six other cities in California had more restrictive smoking laws than Santa Monica and implied that he wished Santa Monica had been first.

He wanted Santa Monica to be "in the vanguard".

Vanguard? Isn't that a word used by great reformers like Lenin, Stalin, etc.? /sarc

"Why any freedom-loving American continues to live in CA is a mystery to me."

We have family and friends that don't seem to be as upset by the tyrannies of the "Golden State", and our desire to be near them outweighs are desire to be free from the tyrannies ourselves.

Also, when the good conservative folks left the big cities for the suburbs that was the beginning of the end. The good conservative folks made out for a while in nicer, cleaner cities with less regulation. However, the nearby cities continued to fester and become even more Democrat. Ultimately the cancer from these cesspools leaked into the suburbs and now the good conservative folks are at a loss as to what to do.

California is a cancer. If all of the good conservative folks leave then it will become even more so. And as we have 10% of the vote, our cancerous ways will be coming to a good conservative state near you.

We screwed up Colorado. We're screwing up Nevada, and even Utah for Joseph Smith's Sake!

In a few more years we'll even screw up Texas. We've already established a beachhead in Austin.

Since when was it a good military strategy to run away from the place where the battle was raging the fiercest and hunker down on the sidelines until the enemy was strong enough to eliminate all resistance?

What resistance? Three cities have filed for bankruptcy and more will probably follow. The state is a sanctuary for illegals and cost the state billions. Homosexuals run the show. Doesn’t seem resistance is working. Sometimes you have to give up and move to a more hospitable area. There is such thing as a losing battle.

I grew up in a house where both parents smoked - all the while we were growing up.

Mom smoked cigarettes all her adult life. Dad went from cigarettes, to a pipe, to cigars.

Their six eldest children (out of 8) began smoking in our teens, early or late (me at sixteen). Seven of us smoked for many years as adults (I quit at age 38). Two of the eight, as adults, still smoke.

In my teens, I painted the living, dining, & kitchen rooms and hallway in our four bedroom house twice, to get the walls and ceilings back to the light beige and white that was under the tan film left by all the smoking.

OMG!!!!!! None of us (the 8 children of my forever-smoking parents) (the youngest of which is in her fifties), ever developed childhood leukemia, and none have developed lung cancer, cancer of the larynx or the pharynx, brain, bladder, rectum, stomach or breast cancer (claims of the American Cancer Society - http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/TobaccoCancer/secondhand-smoke) and none have perennial upper respiratory issues or diseases!!! No one.

If “second hand smoke” is irretrievably and absolutely due to cause cancer to anyone exposed regularly to it, how is my family’s medical history possible?

It’s not.

Full disclosure - I am not defending the idea that anyone should smoke. I do not think it is healthy, besides being a costly addictive behavior. That said, many of the “no smoking” and “no second hand smoke” laws are laws made by Nazis.

Correlation is not causation.

Cigarette smoke contains substances that in certain concentrations have been identified as causing cancer - in rats.

Second hand smoke contains some of those substances. [however many factors can effect the concentration of them in second hand smoke]

Person obtains lung cancer.

Doctor asks: Were you ever exposed to “second hand smoke”,

Person answers: Yes.

Doctor: Second hand smoke caused your cancer.

That is not proof, it is a conjecture that assumes that correlation equals causation. It doesn’t.

An entire “tox screen” would need to be taken back through the patients life up to that point(any carcinogen from any source at any time in any manner), from which afterward only a more accurate statistical possibility could be found to point to “second hand smoke”, or not), but not proof.

The greatest “carcinogen” effecting political thought today is not second hand smoke, it’s junk science.

Landscapers who use gas powered blowers at 730 in the morning, while blowing leaves, dust, trash and dog poop through your windows, are OK to smoke, but only when not blowing shit in your face and only in designated areas.

26
posted on 07/11/2012 6:04:13 PM PDT
by dragnet2
(Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)

A lease, or agreement to rent, establishes the renter or lease holder as having legal possession, which establishes their rented space as legally “their own home”.

However,

on the opposite side of the Santa Monica Nazi-like city council, it should need no city law, and should be held constitutional, if by their own choice and their own volition, owners of multi-family buildings say they chose to rent or say they chose to not rent to people who smoke.

It’s your property; you can decide to be against “second hand smoke”, or not.

The renter who is concerned about this question can be reasonably expected to ask the landlord before deciding to rent.

**But illegal aliens using gas-powered leaf blowers on the grounds of such complexes is acceptable?**

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 26, 2010

Beginning this Thursday, October 28, enforcement of Santa Monica's recently updated motorized leaf blower restrictions will be taken over by the City's Office of Sustainability and the Environment (OSE). Originally banned in the early 1990s, motorized leaf blower restrictions were difficult and costly to enforce due to the requirement that the violation be directly observed by a sworn police officer. In order to improve enforcement, Santa Monica's City Council adopted changes to the ordinance to allow OSE staff to issue administrative citations to leaf blower operators, landscaping companies, property owners and/or property managers. OSE's bi-lingual inspectors will initially focus on public education about the ordinance and about alternatives to using motorized leaf blowers for removing debris from landscapes quickly and economically.

Information about whether a unit is smoking or non-smoking would also be given to every resident in the building, concerning at least two city council members that the designation would create second class citizens,

WoW! See that? The City Council is worried about 'creating second class citizens' as they pass ordinances creating 'second class citizens'....They just granted themselves 'king power' to grant second class citizenship - no one else should be able to do this but them...

Well in situations like this, I just lie. Flat out lie. “Are you a smoker?” No.

No government control freak is going to tell me what I can do in my own home be it a rental unit or private home. That simple. Go ahead, throw me in jail. I want to be the first smoker tossed in jail in our so called “Free” country. I dare them.

Then again I was smart enough to move away from Kalifornistan in 2003 and there are so many smokers in Nevada that I dont have much to worry about. Even the “ban” they passed here is largely ignored in most places.

You are correct, of course. It is a very small step to go from private property being run as restaurants and bars to private property being offered as living quarters to renters. Of course, then it is a small step to private property used as living quarters by the actual owner of the property...

In the meantime, the precedent will be used to ban bible studies in private residences...and FReepers will be up in arms.

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